Tag Archives: moral equivalence

Holidays and Insensitivity

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Are we going too far with our concern for civility and sensitivity in our speech?  A Massachusetts elementary school is having trouble with the sensitivity of our fall holidays, as reported here by FoxNews.

Essentially, the problem seems to center on celebrating Christopher Columbus’ discovery of the New World, that sailor having committed “atrocities” and “annihilated” peoples; Hallowe’en’s connection to witchcraft, and Thanksgiving insensitivities “on the same lines” as Columbus Day celebrations.  FoxNews’ juxtaposition of the Columbus Day and Thanksgiving objections seems to imply that the latter is somehow connected to the former, but that could be a misunderstanding on my part.

Accordingly, I have emailed the following to Dr Anne Foley, Principal of the John F Kennedy School in Somerville, MA, hoping to gain clarity on the matter.

You are quoted by FoxNews as saying  “”For many of us and our students celebrating this particular person is an insult and a slight to the people he annihilated. On the same lines, we need to be careful around the Thanksgiving Day time as well.  …celebrating this particular person is an insult and a slight to the people he annihilated….”  Is this an accurate quote?  If not, please clarify.

On the assumption that this is an accurate quote, my questions are these:

What atrocities, exactly, did Christopher Columbus commit; whom did he annihilate?

Should we return to European religious persecution and murder all North American colonists and their descendants, escape from which was made possible by Columbus’ discovery?

What did the first Thanksgiving celebrate?

What does it celebrate today?

What is the connection among that celebration, the Mayflower (or the Margaret, or Juan de Onate, or Pedro Menéndez de Avilés),  and Christopher Columbus?

What history lessons will your teachers hold on these holidays?

Thank you for your kind attention to these questions.  I look forward to an informative and fruitful dialog.

In the same vein, I emailed the following to Dr Tony Pierantozzi, Superintendent of Schools for Somerville, MA, also seeking clarity.

You are cited by FoxNews in this way: “Superintendant Tony Pierantozzi told The Herald that Halloween is “problematic” because of connections to witchcraft.”

Is this an accurate paraphrase?  If not, please clarify.

On the assumption that this is an accurate quote, my questions are these:

What is the connection between Hallowe’en and witchcraft?

Who does this connection harm?  In what way?

Should we also ban All Saints’ Day (All Hallows) celebrations, that being the second day of the two-day celebration of All Hallows’ Eve and All Saints’ Day?

What about All Souls’ Day, which follows All Saints’ Day?

Thank you for your kind attention to these questions.  I look forward to an informative and fruitful dialog.

When I get responses, or when it becomes clear that no clarification will be forthcoming, I’ll post again on this.

Update: Corrected Dr Pierantozzi’s name.  He’s entitled to have it spelled right.

Cynicism

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Fred Barnes writes in The Weekly Standard about the boneheaded economics of “liberal Democrats.  With all due respect to Mr. Barnes, who is a far better writer than I, I beg to differ with his characterization.  Here are the examples he presents of their boneheadedness.

Barbara Lee, a House member from California, is upset about computerized checkout lines at grocery stores. She avoids lines with no flesh-and-blood checker.  “I refuse to do that,” Lee said at a House Appropriations Committee hearing, “I know that’s a job or two or three that’s gone.”

Representative Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois is up in arms about the iPad, which he declared on the House floor recently is “now probably responsible for eliminating thousands of jobs.”  Alas, “what becomes of bookstores and librarians and all the jobs associated with paper?” Quite soon, he said, “such jobs will simply not exist.”

House minority leader Nancy Pelosi has her own remedy for the jobs dearth: Extend unemployment benefits.  “It injects demand into the economy,” she insists.  “It creates jobs faster than almost any other initiative you can name.” It has the “double benefit” of putting money in the pockets of the jobless and acting as a “job creator.”

Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota is the champion of job creation by adding to the regulatory burden of businesses. Sounds counter-productive, right? Not so, Ellison told MSNBC. Companies will have to hire more people to comply with new regs.  “If the government says, look, we have got to reduce our carbon footprint, you will kick into gear a whole number of people that know how to do that or have ideas about that, and that will be a job engine,” Ellison said.

These are all very smart people; they know better, Mr. Barnes notwithstanding.  Rep Lee knows that technology creates more, and better, jobs than its lack.  Otherwise, she’d be pushing legislation to return us to the 19th century when roads were built with shovels and picks, there’d be no electricity to light her reading lamp, and there’d be no telephones or cars to ease her communication or travel.

Rep. Jackson had just been extolling the virtues of the iPad a few months prior to his remarks above.  I don’t think this flip-flop is an indication of any boneheadedness on his part.

Rep Pelosi didn’t get to be the Representative of the 8th District of California for 24 years and Speaker of the House of Representatives for 6 years because she’s a ditz.

Finally, Rep Ellison knows regulations don’t create jobs.  If they did, we’d have full employment, what with the number of government regulations expanding from 2600 pages in the Federal Register in 1936 to over 80,000 pages today.

It’s clear that these Progressives do think we are boneheaded, though.  It’s been their mantra for the last couple of years, for instance, that if only we understood what they were saying to us we would, perforce, agree with them and fall right in line with their government-will-take-care-of-us meme.  But since we don’t agree, they say it must be because we don’t understand; there must be something wrong with their messaging.  They need, they say, to keep adjusting their message until we do understand them.  They just need to keep dumbing down their message until we finally get it.

No, these Congressmen aren’t boneheaded.  Nor is their economics; those words aren’t intended to have any meaning.  This is just part of their messaging, and part of their cynical attitude toward us.  They’re used to having us dependent on themon government for our welfare, and they’re loathe to lose that power.  When they were swept to dominant positions by the 2008 elections, they rolled the dice on their control of our welfare.  They passed “stimulus” spending for the benefit of their unions, then they rammed through Obamacare to drastically increase our dependency on themon government, and then they rammed through Dodd-Frank to hamstring American businesses so as to increase our dependency.  Only three years on, with unemployment ranging between 9% and 10% the entire time, did they finally get around to paying lip service to a “jobs” bill.  But this is, in the event, just an attempt to push class warfare, while looking to continue paying us for (still) not working with yet more “unemployment insurance”—insurance designed to insure that we continue to not work and remain dependent on…government. Oh, and it has further spending for their unions.

After the midterm elections last year, and with the continuing disaster of their policies these last three years, they’re simply worried about losing their power.  This latest round of claims which Mr. Barnes provides just shows the Progressive cynical attitude toward us: they’ll say anything they can think of to pander to us, get our votes, and stay in power.

Duty and Market Intervention

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I want to describe a few of instances of government intervention into our free market, then I want to describe a couple of cases of civic duty avoidance.  Then I’ll tie these two together.

Scott Gottlieb, an ex-deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, describes in a recent The Wall Street Journal a case of FDA intervention in our market.  The salient parts of the intervention, for our purposes, are these: a superior means of repairing an aging (and so failing) valve that allows blood to flow from the heart into the aorta, a means in use in Europe for four years, is finally becoming available in the US.  The FDA insisted on increasingly extensive, slow, and costly animal and clinical studies—all for our own good.  One result of this sort of delay is that more and more American medical device makers are moving their businesses overseas, at the expense reduced availability of medical innovations to Americans.

John Carreyrou, in another The Wall Street Journal article, describes a different case of medical industry market intervention.   What’s relevant here is this: in response to the method by which Medicare measures the efficiency with which services are delivered to patients receiving home-health care, the nation’s three largest home-health care companies altered their delivery methods to maximize their reimbursements under those measurements.  Of course, this may have affected the efficiency of the care actually delivered.

In the third instance, Bob Greifeld, CEO of Nasdaq OMX, describes in a recent The Wall Street Journal article, problems with Sarbanes-Oxley’s market intervention.  Here, Greifeld notes that small business’ portion of job creation in the US has fallen from 64% of the new jobs in the period from 1993 through 2008 to 51% in 2010.  Further, initial public offerings—a primary means by which companies raise capital besides borrowing—by small companies (IPOs of $50 million or less) fell from 300 per year, on average, in the ’90s (before Sarbox’ enactment in 2002) to 30 in 2010.  These reductions, while also depressed by the current economic Panic, are due largely to the cost of Sarbox compliance, which hits small companies far harder than it does the large corporations, and this in turn inhibits their growth and hiring.  Sarbox’ efforts to protect investors from their own decisions is hurting small business growth and employment.

Here, now, are the civic duty items; both involving jury duty.  In Hillsborough County, FL, a judge there was confronted with no less than 387 individuals who had ignored their jury summons on a single day (it took him 3 hours to gather 22 good citizens for a single jury pool).  His response was to issue summons to those “absentees” to explain their absence; unsatisfactory excuses could earn their offerors a fine or 6 months in jail.  In Midland County, TX, the judges faced a similar situation, with 294 no-shows on a single day.  Similar summons for show-cause hearings were issued, with unsastisfactory excuses similarly earning fines or jail for their offerors.  These two examples are all too typical, both for the two counties and for the nation.  Such skips not only are individually wrong; in their aggregate they degrade the defendant’s right to a fair and prompt trial.  And they degrade the government’s ability to obtain justice for the victims of the miscreancy in question.

Thus, on the one hand, we have government interfering with individuals’ free choice and assuming outright the responsibility for those choices, and on the other hand we have free individuals shirking their duty to their neighbors and to their community (and ultimately to their country).  Here’s how they’re related, as if you haven’t figured that out by now.  When we allow government to interfere with our choices, when we allow government to protect us from ourselves, when we allow government to assume responsibility for the outcomes of our choices, we become habituated to government handling our responsibilities for us.  And we lose our sense of responsibility.  And we shirk our responsibilities, assuming always that someone else will take care of the matter for us.

The outcome of this is not just that we grow lazy and amoral.  We lose our freedom: the only way government can take care of us, can satisfy our responsibilities for us, is by managing our outcomes for us, by managing our choices for us.  By controlling our behavior.

Obamatalk on the Global Stage

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Iran has perpetrated a deliberate, calculated act of war against the United States with the just publicized plot to murder the Saudi Ambassador to the United States, and subsequent action to blow up the Saudi Arabian and Israeli embassies, all on American soil (an attack magnified in its perfidy by being attacks on diplomats, who everywhere but in barbarism are proof against assault, as diplomats are the only way nations have to speak with each other aside from open war).

I wrote here about the laughing stock our President has made of himself on the world stage.  This is the latest example of the dangers to which Obama’s—what: foolishness? repugnant timidity?—have exposed our country.  Other examples include the Christmas bomber (AKA underwear bomber), whose attempt at terrorism only failed due to his own incompetence; the New York subway bombing attempt, which was foiled by skilled FBI agents; the New York Times Square parked car bombing attempt, which was foiled only by a couple of alert street vendors; the list goes on.  All of these have occurred in the last three years.  All of these garnered an Obama response of threats, finger-shaking, and efforts to “isolate” of Iran.

And this week, in the aftermath of a highly laudable and successful attack on the terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki, he’s actually apologizing, in all seriousness, to the family of another terrorist who was killed along with al-Awlaki for our misdeed in having killed that additional terrorist—a…man who, by his own words, is “proud to be a traitor to America.”

In the seven years between 9/11 and the beginning of the Obama administration, there were no further attempts against our country that weren’t preempted, or blocked, far from our borders.  One difference between then and now is that the prior administration took positive action against the terrorists associated with the destruction of the World Trade Center, the attack on the Pentagon, and the apparent attack on the White House, and against terrorism generally.

What is Obama’s response to Iran’s act of war?  Here it is, in his own words, as provided by Powerline:

So with respect to how we respond, our first step is to make sure that we prosecute those individuals that have been named in the indictment. And I will leave to the Attorney General the task of describing how that will proceed.

The second thing that we’re going to continue to do is to apply the toughest sanctions and continue to mobilize the international community to make sure that Iran is further and further isolated and that it pays a price for this kind of behavior.

and

…what you can expect is that we will continue to apply the sorts of pressure that will have a direct impact on the Iranian government until it makes a better choice….

His rationale for thinking this might actually be effective?  Again, his own words:

…we’ve been able to unify the international community in naming Iran’s misbehavior and saying that it’s got to stop and there are going to be consequences to its actions.

But, what consequences, for example; and, when, exactly?  This is just Obamatalk—empty threats and firm finger-shaking, with no intention of actually doing anything.

To be meaningful, consequences have to be capable of altering the target’s behavior in a direction favorable to us, not merely make us feel good.  Obama’s words have no deterrent capacity whatsoever; the terrorists and their sponsors know that all we’ll do in response—all the United States, the most powerful nation on Earth, on paper—has the courage to do, is bark and growl like an old dog.

Idle chit-chat, empty threats only alter the target’s behavior in this way: they fill the target with contempt for us, and they encourage the target to continue and to escalate.  Any street hood from Chicago knows this.  Surely, a community organizer from Chicago knows this, too.

Fair Share and Economic Mobility

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Much has been made, in the last few years, of an apparent increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, while the poor get poorer.  One result of this has been a demand that the rich should pay more taxes; they should pay “their fair share.”  Another result has been a general objection to the increasing wealth of those who are already wealthy; there should be a general redistribution of their wealth to the poor.

In addition to attempting to define what “their fair share” should be, it’s also useful to explore whether the wealth disparity in the US is really all that bad.

Let’s look first at the question of “fair share.”  I’ve written elsewhere that in 1999, the top 10% of Americans, by income, paid 66% of the total income taxes collected by the Federal government, while the bottom 50% paid 4% of the total; in 2008—after the Bush tax cuts that so favored the rich—the top 10% of Americans’ share had increased to 70% of the total income taxes, while the bottom 50%’s share had decreased to 3% of that total.  With the richest Americans’ share of the tax burden increasing, already, what is their “fair share?”

Further, when we look at actual income vs. taxes, we see this in 2008—again, after those Bush tax cuts “for the rich;” the disparity is even more startling.  The top 1% by income, who earned 20% of the total income in the US, paid nearly 40% of the total taxes paid by Americans.  That bottom 50%, who paid those 3%, actually earned nearly 13% of the nation’s total income.  Again, what is the “fair share” of the rich?  I suggest it’s already been met, and more.

Still, were the concentration of wealth and the associated wealth disparity static, there might be a valid beef, if only from the practical standpoint that such stationarity would contribute to stagnation in our economy, at the cost of continued improvement in well-being for us all.  But when we look at income mobility, we see no such stationarity.

When we look at minimum wage earners, for instance, we find that adults who earned at minimum wage levels over the period 1998 through 2006 did so only relatively briefly.  Then, rather than losing their income altogether, they moved on to better paying jobs.

We can look at this another way, too.  According to the Treasury Department’s “Income Mobility in the US from 1996 to 2005” report, the children of today’s poverty-level family are part of the next generation’s middle class families.  Today’s poor young man is tomorrow’s middle-aged middle class man.  Indeed, “80 percent of taxpayers had incomes in quintiles as high or higher in 2005 than they did in 1996, and 45 percent of taxpayers not in the highest income quintile moved up at least one quintile.” Further, the median incomes of those in the lower quintiles increased more than did the median incomes of the higher quintiles.  Not only are today’s poor a different group of people than yesterday’s, today’s poor are better off in absolute terms than were yesterday’s poor.

The movement runs both ways, as it must: relative movements are a zero-sum game.  Not only is yesterday’s poor man not today’s poor man, because yesterday’s poor man has gotten better off, relatively as well as absolutely, yesterday’s rich man is not today’s rich man: he’s lost ground relatively as well as absolutely.  “Among those with the very highest incomes in 1996—the top 1/100th of 1%—only 25% remained in this group in 2005….  [T]he real median income of these taxpayers declined over this period.”  It’s broader than that, too: 30% of those in the top quintile in income in 1996 had fallen to the next lower quintile by 2005, and nearly 3% had fallen all the way to the bottom quintile.

It seems that demands for the rich to pay “their fair share” are redundant; they already are.  It’s that bottom 50% that seems to be underpaying their “fair share.”  Further, demands for the class warfare of wealth redistribution would seem to be aimed at a moving target.  Our free market economy already is redistributing wealth, as Americans earn their way out of poverty, or lower middle class, or middle class, and enter those better off groups.  Demands to take wealth away from the rich are demands to take property away from those who’ve only just earned it with a lifetime of hard work and sweat.  And they are demands to deny that property to the children of these only newly successful.